Dangerously thin, dressed in a pleated black dancer's skirt with black leotards below and tight black ribbed shirt above, Amber appeared torn between death and disco.

Rides of the Midway By Lee Durkee W.W. Norton 320 pages Fiction Buy it What to read The best of February fiction. By Salon's critics Print story E-mail story

The cop was squinting at the Polaroids so intently that it appeared the developing process was of telepathic origin.

But, even more than these, Durkee calls to mind the early Barry Hannah -- rattling his lingual sabers, jitterbugging on the edge of absurdity, lobbing lit firecrackers at his startled audience. "Rides of the Midway" is a manic, sloshed, whiny, fizzy, horny, noisome and wondrous novel.

Set in the '70s in the skankier, preacher-riddled portions of south Mississippi, the action begins when 10-year-old Noel Weatherspoon, playing Little League ball for the Standard Oil Red Sox, shatters the collarbone of the opposing catcher and sends the poor tyke into a coma. This collision, however haphazard and incidental, launches the decade-long spiritual unraveling that constitutes the bulk of Durkee's story: Noel plunges headlong into drugs, pornography, voyeurism, sex with a watermelon (leading, it begs mention, to a family supper worthy of the Portnoys), mercy killing, more drugs, vandalism, adultery and so on.

It's an extravagantly hedonistic spiral, to be sure, but not one wholly nihilistic; underpinning the novel's deft and toothsome hilarity is Noel's hopped-up and half-witted grab for theological autonomy, a Baudelairean effort to escape the prepackaged salvation championed by his Billy Graham look-alike stepfather and church-soaked community and to find God -- or, less concretely, whatever designer propels this "darkly spinning" world -- on none but his own terms. Noel's effort is a vital, almost-involuntary one, as vital and involuntary as this coarsely graceful novel feels -- as vital and involuntary, that is, as the truest art.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"